W. Gavin Robb

architecture is political.

architect, housing advocate, educator, activist, instigator, dreamer, urbanist. teaching @risdarch @NU_Architecture all views my own

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@hankgreen Go to the musée des arts eat metiers next!!

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@KyleKulinski Not with that attitude!

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@CTprogressive_ @TheMaineWire The troops, obviously 🙄

[Samantha Rose Hill @Samantharhill]

Pope Leo XIV in his first encyclical citing Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism to warn AI risks producing the exact condition Arendt identified as the prerequisite for totalitarian domination by destroying people's ability to discern between fact and fiction.

[Diane Montagna @dianemontagna]

JUST IN: Vatican releases Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of AI. https://t.co/6Zn5OMJvdn

On Transhumanism and Posthumanism, Pope Leo XIV writes:

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. … For this reason, a clear distinction must be made. It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation.’”

Read the encyclical here: https://t.co/6Zn5OMJvdn

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@ErikBootsma @BenedictineKS Nobody’s talking morality, just appropriateness.

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

Flawless. No notes.

[Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 @PollTracker2024]

Asked directly if she still supported abolishing police, Francesca Hong said in a statement:

“While I envision a world where public safety is not synonymous with law enforcement, I recognize that this paradigm shift is a very long term vision and my focus is building systems of care for now and for our future.”

#WisconsinGovernor

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@YIMBYLAND Hell yes!

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@MatrixMysteries As if being able to go to the aquarium like everybody else counterbalances crippling poverty 🙄

Seriously, what is wrong with you?

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

Congratulations, you have discovered how government works.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

@micah_erfan “He eliminated the deficit” just means the government extracted enough money from taxpayers to cover it. The debt didn’t vanish. It was transferred from the city ledger onto the backs of the people funding it through taxation.

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@MikeBales It was, until the right got co-opted by fascists and adopted a homicidal ideology.

“Politics” is how much taxes you should pay, not whether citizens should be shot in the street.

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@AlmaMaderoNoFue A “market economy” and Capitalism are not the same thing.

[Alain Astruc @alainastruc]

The only thing epic here is the aesthetic catastrophe.

Nolan is a cerebral director of the global anglo world, all his intelligence put to industrial ends. Grey matter for a grey world. Nothing in this trailer is Greek. Nothing is Mediterranean. No olive groves and no white stone burning under the sun and no salt and no pine and no sea-glare. A deracinated Odyssey, made for imaginary nobodies from nowhere.

The script feels like it's going to be the work of a diligent student who took down the events of the Odyssey one by one, forgetting that this is not a novel but an archaic poem, from a time when men and women lived each word as a heartbeat, who sang the soul and flesh of a people and of a world at once real and supernatural. A poem in which Telemachus does not say "my dad is coming home."

The Odyssey deserved a Parajanov or a Fellini or a Welles, someone larger than life, a Dionysian ogre, someone hungry, someone who could make a film that smells of figs and raw wool and roasting meat and tar and blood. Monsters that are actually monstrous and seductive witches with real venom and golden shields catching real light and banquets going on for days.

And the women of the poem, who are everywhere in Homer and seem so cold and dull here. Circe in her smoke and Calypso in her cave and Penelope at her loom, the sensuality of witches and the rigid loyalty of wives, all replaced by a fashion-armor Athena and a Penelope played as a strong American woman.

And then there is what the Odysseus of the trailer says: "No one can stand between me and home, not even the gods". The cunning sufferer who knew how to bow to divine forces turned into a defiant individualist who bows to no one. Greek cunning replaced by American autonomy. The poem's central lesson reversed in a single line of dialogue.

I usually don't mind Hollywood slop, but this has made me weirdly angry, and the film isn't even out yet. I feel as if a red line has been crossed, some hubris that has gone too far. The gods have been angered. How could they not be, with the decapitation of that statue at the end of the trailer? An iconoclastic gesture absent from Homer, usual with the monotheistic traditions that have spent centuries smashing pagan images.

Nietzsche said he would believe only in a god who knew how to dance. Apollo without Dionysus produces exactly this: cerebral, cold, unambiguous. I cannot trust a filmmaker who is not hungry enough to banquet with the gods.

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@chitownsam723b I mean, yes.

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@mto_on_x @RichardHanania I mean, enjoy your hollow life.

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

@vers_laLune Purple is more rational than orange.

[W. Gavin Robb @wgavinrobb]

Logical to pick blue. This is supported by game theory.

From the selfish view (orange) it is rational to pick red.

From the collectivist view (purple) it is rational to pick blue.

Our species survived because of collectivism, thus, blue is rational.

Red is humanity’s suicide.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?